Good evening (or Saturday morning, depending on where you are), everyone.

My apologies for not getting to this sooner; I’m attending a conference here in NYC this weekend, and I thought I would have a little time to myself to get the FFT up. Alas! I’ve not had a moment to myself since 6 this morning (it’s now nearly 8:30 at night).

I am exhausted, I am exhilarated, and I have hours of work ahead to prepare for tomorrow. This conference is unlike any other I have attended, and is probably going to do more to change me (for the better) as a pedagogue than anything else I have done in the last ten years. Seriously. Things will be different this fall.

I can’t go into detail (time and sense forbids it), but suffice it to say that I’ve spent the last two days determining the fate of the Indian nation at the cusp of independence from the British. (You know, as one does.) Through some truly heroic efforts, we managed to rewrite history and prevent the Partition without significant bloodshed. It. Was. Awesome.

I’ll be working on determining the fate of religious freedom in the Massachusetts Bay Colony over the next couple days, so I need to nestle in with my KJV tonight. While I’m focusing on matters national and spiritual, you should respond to this weekend’s FFT: the moment in your education (at whatever level of instruction formality) that you almost literally felt the lightbulb go on over your head.

Tell us the story, describe the class or lesson or concept, or write a tribute to the teacher/s who exploded your brain open in exciting and productive ways. What knowledge changed your life, and how?

16 Responses to “Friday (Night) Fun Thread: Best. Class. EVAR.”

I’ve now been teaching for longer than I was a student (and that’s saying something, for someone with three degrees), so can’t recall best class ever at the moment, but I’ll think about it.

Wait – as I type, I remember English teacher Carol LeSeure. 12th grade rhetoric. Convinced me I was a great writer and that I should find a way to make a career of it. I sort of did – I’m a university professor, a scholar/teacher who writes.

My best class EVAR was also an English class: Literary Fundamentals. I had grown accustomed to the “we don’t deal with politics, social justice or equity; just maximization/minimization” apologists of my first discipline. I wondered, however, if I was the only one in my program who questioned our models/assumptions. Then, this past year, I took Literary Fundamentals. To take part in a class where we were encouraged to not only point out but question, research and respond to the gender/class/race/(post)-colonial/psychological messages, assumptions and models of foundational texts was, just, well, amazing.
The light bulb went on over my head during our critical examination of The Bible. A classmate read a passage aloud containing the phrase “Wealth of Nations”. Prior to this class, I had no idea where the title of the seminal book by Adam Smith had come from. Prior to this class, I had no idea that the basic assumptions of my first discipline might be linked to a very specific world view and particular religion. Prior to this class, I didn’t feel I was allowed to question economic models/assumptions unless I had first become an expert in mathematics and statistical analysis.
This class has opened me up to an entirely new way of examining and understanding not only my first discipline, but also myself and my own assumptions. Taking Literary Fundamentals was the Best. Decision. EVAR.

I had always been a bookworm, but in high school English, I felt like a) it wasn’t real work because it was too easy and b) it was a load of crap because ‘how can we know what the author was trying to say’?

The lightbulb started to glow in my first tutorial with the Best Teacher Ever, which was about modern French literature, when she mentioned that what the author was trying to say was more or less irrelevant. She told us to look at what the TEXT was saying, which might not be what the author had consciously intended. Revelation!!

Fast-forward a few months – I had an essay to write on 12 poems by a hermetic 19th century poet and had No. Idea. what the hell they were saying, even though I understood the words. But the Best Teacher Ever happened to be an expert in his poetry and I didn’t want to embarrass myself with a poor effort. So I read the poems over. and over. and over. And looked up some criticism. And read again. And again. It took a couple of days, but then there literally came a moment when it all just started to make sense. It was a real epiphany, and that one experience still inspires me when I’m tackling a difficult text, because I know it can be worth it.

What made the Best Teacher Ever the Best Teacher Ever? She a) knew her stuff like nobody’s business; b) was incredibly down-to-earth – didn’t make Literature seem like some exclusive club; c) was initially a bit intimidating just because of sheer brain-power, but was also kind, and generous with her time; d) was (later) there for me and other students when we were in times of crisis, including handing out her personal phone number – I didn’t need to use it but was grateful all the same.

She really put the onus on us to learn on our own, rather than coming to her seeking answers. (Hence me holed up with the books for a week). She just put us through our paces when we came to her – so I’d say she also made me think that the best teachers are the ones who inspire you to teach yourself.

I think I’ve been really lucky to have had some of the best university lecturers, and courses. I didn’t really enjoy high school very much (was really about the sport for me).

As for uni, the types of material covered in my undergrad have been amazing.

In particular, the following classes were inspirational and light bulb worthy:
* Econonomic Foundations of Contemporary Capitalism – the lecturer is one that I have an intellectual crush on, and despite his unsocial manner, he loved it when students asked questions. He really knew what he was talking about, and wanted to share this knowledge with us. When you sent him an email with questions, he would write unbelievably detailed replies, with references for you to check out. The type of material covered was simply surreal – we used original texts. This class got me thinking about possibility doing honours.
* Finance: Volatility and Regulation – the lecturer inspired me to undertake honours, especially in this area. Through his pedagogical approach the reader that he put together was all that what was required to complete the assessment tasks – no further research because of his pedagogical approach to this class. He encouraged close reading of the texts and to look at what was present and absent in the seminal finance journal articles. This was when I started to feel like what I thought counted, and the lecturer encouraged this.
* Critical Thinking – it helped that the lecturer was good looking. Be that as it may, the logic skills developed in this course I have found so useful throughout my undergrad: logical fallacies, and understanding statistics, in particular, opened my eyes to arguments I use in essays.
* Economic policy in glocal context – this lecturer was so awesome, the depth of her knowledge, encouraging students to critically engage with the material, and I finally found a female academic who did the sorts of things I am interested in – I felt I hit the jackpot. The material covered here also continued to inspire me to undertake honours, with her as my honours supervisor.
* Thinking Gender – this class was completely different to what I had previously studied. This unit got me through a year that I had some gender related health issues. The readings and the way that the lecturer approached the material opened my eyes to different ways of understanding gender, and with the tools that were developed in this class I found myself feeling more comfortable in my own skin.

Oh, I should add that at my university, we wrote essays on the subject of the week before we had met with the teacher about it. Sometimes you were lucky enough to already have had a lecture on it, sometimes not. Then the teacher would read what we had written, make comments, and lead a discussion. In the case above, what made the task all the harder is that we hadn’t had any lectures or anything on this author yet.

The most revelatory single class I ever had was a survey course in History and Philosophy of Science. It absolutely made me see the world in a new way and got me started reading in the sciences. As someone who was never adept in hands-on science courses in high school, this was the first time I really began to understand how the sciences work to change our world views, whether or not that’s what any particular scientist intends to do.

The class was taught by a professor but we also had a brilliant TA who was a Ph.D candidate. He gave a lecture on Newton that was the single best lecture I ever heard-I left with my head spinning.

HPS is great stuff. If you’ve never studied it, I highly recommend trying it out. Yeah, it’s very Western/white male oriented, but those are the people who have helped create our understanding of physical reality.

Oh jeez. This should tell you how much I disliked school. I can’t think of anything! I can tell you classes I enjoyed more then others but I never had that, omg this class is changing my whole philosophy of life experience.

I guess (and this is a somewhat embarrassing admission) taking a Law & Economics class in law school totally revealed to me that the Chicago School of Economics was total and complete crud. Before taking the class I’d read an article here and there and think well that makes sense. Which is why I think I took the class to begin with. Like a few weeks in I was like, “I hate this and I think it’s total bullshit.”

It wasn’t my favorite class, per se, but a Hebrew Bible class in my university’s religion dept. totally blew my mind and started me on my path from conservative Christianity to atheism. Taking that class was like opening Pandora’s box.

Fantastic! My dad was actually attending this conference too! (He was a member of the communist faction in the Indian Independence game.) He’s been teaching using these games for years now and I have always been deeply jealous of his students for getting to participate in such an awesome academic endeavor.

@bluebears – that’s why I have had the light bulb moments in those economicsy classes I had done. They covered the orthodox and heterodox approaches to economics, which means that things like the Chicago School is seen in its context of a whole discipline. and I hear you about the Chicago School.

My favorite professor, bar none, was an acerbic, crusty old English department lifer who was so brilliant, so subversively witty and such a good discussion leader that I took a 4-credit course with him at least once a year for all four years of college. I even took his Milton class—he was a renowned Miltonist—despite the fact that I hate hate HATE Milton. And because he was so good, I wound up quite enjoying the class, even though it didn’t ultimately shift my opinion on Milton. Also, he was the only professor I ever had who did not refer to students by their first names. I was always “Ms. Sharper” to him. He was old-school like that.

I also took an awesome Religion class called “Cults, Sects and Small Denominations in American Religion.” I probably get more day-to-day use out of that class than any other I took in college. I now know why Jehovah’s Witnesses are always at my door, why Mormons are so obsessed with genealogy, why Seventh Day Adventists are vegetarians and why Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X wound up being antagonists. That class was SO useful to my understanding of American culture.

I’ve had a lot of classes that I’ve really enjoyed in college, especially a course on fan culture and one entitled “Sexuality and Society in Modern Europe”, but the light bulb moment for me was in high school when I was doing an engineering competition at the behest of my chemistry teacher. I’d been working on solving the assigned problem for about 2.5 hours and making some small error in my calculations. Finally, I figured it out and got what I knew to be the right answer about 10 seconds before time was up. Our team won 1st place nationally. It was so incredibly exhilarating, that I could actually solve problems like that (this one was about the design of a nuclear reactor) — that was when I knew that solving that sort of problem was what I should be doing for money, and why I went into engineering.

Actually, though it wasn’t my favorite class ever, the class that Changed My Life (and Lit the Bulb in My Head) was an English class I took Junior year of high school, from a poet PhD. I didn’t always like her personally, but her approach to reading and writing turned everything around for me. Everything. She was willing to accept any thesis as long as we found support for it in the text. She didn’t care what “the author intended,” she believed that reading was inherently a creative endeavor, and she wanted to hear what WE found in the text. And she taught me how to do a deep reading using the tools of literary criticism. Not only did I use and hone those skills throughout the rest of my academic career, I finally realized that what *I* thought about a text, the way in which I connected to it personally, mattered. Then I increasingly enjoyed traipsing through literature and criticism ever after. My high school rocked, and she was just one reason why.

Hannah: Small world! Your dad and his comrade were obviously familiar with how the games worked, and they really made a lot of things happen. It was very exciting to be a part of it, and I too am jealous of students who’ve had the chance to play. I’m trying to decide how to incorporate a game (or game-like activities) into my classes in the fall.

Elizabeth: The conference was an annual one at Barnard. Highly recommended.